"GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop. Cimitan used RGBA colormaps to implement the feature and says that, with only 10 or 20 extra lines of code, translucency can easily be added to other theme engines that support RGBA. Cimitan says that the addition of translucency effects proves that critics of GTK are wrong. "[I]n the last week I've seen a lot of people claiming about 'lacks' of Gtk+ capabilities," wrote Cimitan in a blog entry. "Some of them still think that Gtk+ doesn't have RGBA support... Or it will require nasty hacks. This is absolutely false."

Actually I find transparency to be quite a useful feature (if for example you were waiting for something to complete in a shell). It all depends on how you use your desktop. Windows users don't get the concept of virtual desktops but that doesn't mean that they aren't useful. Just because you don't think transparency is useful doesn't mean that the rest of feel the same way. Speak for yourself and leave the rest of us to decide for ourselves. BTW - Apple does NOT invent everything - they just like to claim that they do.